Kapok Computer Co. notebook with AMI 'WinBIOS' which seems to insist
on having a short jump and nop as the first instructions in the
boot sector code. The prevailing theory is that the BIOS is doing
some sort of boot sector virus detection and refusing to run any
boot block that doesn't start with the same instruction sequence as
MS-DOG boot sector code. If this is the case, it would be nice if it
actually printed an error message to this effect instead of just
saying 'FAILED.'
This workaround has no effect on the boot sector code other than to
increase its size by three bytes.
This will make a number of things easier in the future, as well as (finally!)
avoiding the Id-smashing problem which has plagued developers for so long.
Boy, I'm glad we're not using sup anymore. This update would have been
insane otherwise.
is only appropriate to use in the special environment of start.S (real
mode plus some conventions about not saving registers), and asm.h is
supposed to be for generic macros.
Removed some unnecessary parentheses.
Add code to the boot blocks to allow the user to place default boot strings
on block 1 of the disk (2nd block), should the correct magic numbers be present.
If the correct options are used it will 'delete' the name used from block1,
thereby assuring that if the boot fails it won't be stuck in an infinite loop.
the boot strings are set by the utility "nextboot"
(not yet checked in, but being tested.)
By default these changes should have no effect on existing installations
and if compiled without the NAMEBLOCK option should be essentially identical
to the old ones.
been relocated to run in the 64k segment at 0x10000 with the stack at
the top of this segment. This corrects the problems machines with 512K
base memory had booting.
2. startprog routing rewritten to convert the BOOTSEG ss to a KERNELSEG
ss, this eliminated the last of the >512K memory references. Additional
cleanup in here included a better way to copy the arguments to the
kernel stack.
3. Elimination of argv and esym cruft saved a few bytes.
4. Only need to truncate the head.a_entry to a meg boundary once intead
of every time we used it! [Saving more bytes].
5. Addition of version 1 bootinfo structure support. These boot blocks
pass the kernel name in to the kernel now.
6. Removed historical comments about MACH argv stuff, as it is useless now.
2. Clean up the .S files to use /* */ style comments.
This is a totally cosmetic change, not one byte of the resulting boot
code changes. But at least it is installed with correct owners and in
the right places, and gets recompiled correctly when things change!
initializing it to 0 in the floppy boot case. This allows my Toshiba
1910 laptop to finally boot, and may help out other machines cursed
with early Phoenix BIOS's as well.
